Don’t let perfectionism cripple your writing
Have you ever stared at your blinking cursor on the screen, willing the perfect words to flow from your fingertips…. but nothing happens?
🙋♀️
I have. Definitely I have.
Having high standards is great, but not when it stops you from making any progress. I’ve let my inner perfectionist rule, allowed her to stop me from creating, allowed her to drag out what should be a simple task. I’ve been caught up with trying to find the perfect word, I’ve stalled trying to craft the perfect sentence, I’ve delayed while wondering how to smoothly and perfectly flow from one idea to the other.
If you’ve been there too (and hey, who hasn’t), then I have good news for you:
It doesn’t have to be this way!
You can tame your inner perfectionist. You can keep her out of the way when you need to push on (eg when writing a first draft), and you can let her loose when the time is right (eg when revising and editing).
The taming process might feel a bit difficult at first. But I promise it gets easier.
The best way to tackle the beast is to swing hard in the other direction: revel in your errors.
Let typos stand, uncorrected.
Laugh in the face of those bastard wiggly lines highlighting spelling or grammatical errors.
Leave gaps in your text.
Use an ‘okay’ word, even tho you know there is a perfect word out there (“it’s just on the tip of my tongue!! I’ve almost got it!”).
You can come back and fix all those things later.
Next time you’re writing, I challenge you to:
ignore the spelling and grammar warnings that show up in your document. This is a really hard one, and you won’t have to always do this… but give it a go — for a single writing session, for a day, for a week, or whatever it takes until you can ignore the typos peacefully. Let those wiggly underlines be a stern message to your inner perfectionist: I do what I want!
use an imperfect word in your sentence, and push on. Come back to it later. The right word will probably appear in your mind without any effort, once you’ve stopped fixating on trying to find it. Mark it in some way if you like, so it’s easy to jump back to it. I like to use xxx or //// as a visual cue.
write a difficult sentence or idea in 3 different ways (or more!). Leave all the options in, and keep writing. Come back later and see which one feels best — or write a few more options.
leave a gap when you can’t think of a bridge or segue to your next section. It’s more important to get the core information down, you can massage the flow into it later.
Embrace the idea that drafts are always rough. They’re supposed to be rough. Don’t let the the errors and mistakes paralyse you. Take a wicked delight in something that we’re not supposed to do: prioritise quantity over quality.
It won’t be easy at first. But it will get easier. Your writing will flow from your fingertips. You might give yourself some giggles to look at your messy, wonderful, FULL text.
And later, when the hard writing work is done, you can open the door and let your inner perfectionist back out to handle the revisions. She’ll love it.